My "First" Painting Ever

Katelyn Eichwald, Untitled, 2009. Oil and paper on panel, 18 x 24 inches.

This is not my first painting but it is the first painting I made that I did not understand. I had finished undergrad in Illinois and my studio was my parents' dining room table. I had a book on rodeo and another from the 70s or 80s about the preservation of wolves. I thought there was something terrible and magnetic about the images from both of these books -- not just that I FELT something terrible but that it there truly WAS something terrible in the photos themselves. I thought I had to show everyone so they would understand and be afraid with me. Now, I don't know if I was right and perceptive or if I was using those images as stand-ins for a fuzzy, refracted terror I could not bring into focus. Probably the latter, but I won't rule out the possibility of pictures with real darkness held inside them.

The painting has color copies of the following:

a man holding a wolf upright

a man roping a calf (2)

the ass of a calf as it is wrestled to the ground (2)

a woman in sandals standing alone in a wolf pen

the cover of a young adult book about dragons

hugh jackman as wolverine on the cover of usa today

unknown paws

a landscape with green land and blue water (11)

The part that still interests me is the landscape. I had no connection to the landscape as a place, and the photo didn't have the kind of motion I was usually drawn to: bodies on the ground, woodchips, cutoff t-shirts, etc. It was just land and water, a strip of white sky, mint on the edges. I glued the copies to the panel carelessly, which is my way now but was not my way then. The landscape got folded and wrinkly. I rarely mix my oils or use more than a small amount of any color, but I mixed a thick deep blue-green and slopped it all over, filling the rest. I wanted it as wet and finished as a peach crushed against a rock. 

I left the painting out to dry. My parents expressed concern that I was making art that no one would understand. I have always liked the painting and kept it close to me, though I've never known why. Yesterday I read a book in which two children on the edge of adolescence hold small red fruit to each other's lips. When they taste the fruit, they fall in love. In San Francisco, the face painters ran from the ocean to our towels and then dropped like water.